Kindle Fire HDX 7” gets the iFixit treatment

Before you pull out your spudger, you might want to call Mayday.

Ahead of release, the tenacious people over at iFixit have gotten their hands on the Kindle Fire HDX in 7-inch trim and have torn it to bits. There weren't many silicon surprises inside: the 2GB of LP-DDR3 are provided by Samsung and sit atop the Qualcomm SoC; the Wi-Fi solution comes courtesy of Qualcomm, along with the power management components and audio codecs. The battery is revealed to be a 3.8v 4550 mAh (17.3 Whr) model, and the display comes courtesy of LG.

Enlarge/ Motherboard, battery, and midframe all need to be removed to replace the motherboard.

The only real surprise was how hard the Kindle would be to repair. The cables for the display and touch controller are trapped between the motherboard and the tablet's midframe. That makes it nearly impossible to replace the motherboard without disassembling the midframe, which would involve the removal of the battery.

Speaking of that battery, the amount of adhesive used to hold the battery in place makes its removal a challenge. This degree of securing components is evident in other areas, including the multiple screws and pieces of tape used to hold the Wi-Fi antennas in place, and that brings the Fire HDX's repairability score to a 3 out of 10.

Device manufacturers don't have many incentives to make their devices repairable, particularly at these commoditized prices where the value of the device to the manufacturer is in content sales rather than the actual hardware. A buyer's best bet, if their new Kindle goes on the fritz, is to hit that handy Mayday button.

21 Reader Comments

I don't really think that tablets need to be able to be repaired by a user. The trade offs have been shown to be either slimness or repairability. Laptops, desktops and the like should be repairable. Partly this is due to their cost, but they are also expected to have more bulk than a tablet.

However if you want a repairable tablet, there is always the Oracle unit...

Seriously, though, with a decent quality tablet being as cheap as it is these days, I just don't see fixability being that big of an issue. The screen is the big thing that breaks, and it is almost as costly to expensive to replace as the entire tablet itself in most cases. For a previous generation Fire HD, you are looking at around $90 or so to replace the screen and digitizer if it is cracked, while fully replacing the tablet is $139 if you can get by on 8 GB of memory.

Does everything need to be field repairable? I find that the field reparability of a device is highly overrated for something this small. The real question is, is it FACTORY repairable. If so, awesome, but if not they should rework the units. Factory repairability has a mjaor green factor.

Maybe they have everything fastened down because of the way people treat commodity gear?

Doesn't that sound a little convenient for the manufacturers? They use a sub quality component that fails in a year and they say "Too bad! Got to get a new device from us!"

I do not like the direction non repairable devices are going. It encourages waste, not just of precious materials but of money. Some day archeologists (or alien archeologists) will sort through our dumps to learn more about how we lived in the early 21st century and they find millions of small electronic devices and they will scratch their head and ask why we could not reuse or fix them.

Does everything need to be field repairable? I find that the field reparability of a device is highly overrated for something this small. The real question is, is it FACTORY repairable. If so, awesome, but if not they should rework the units. Factory repairability has a mjaor green factor.

Factory repair is only green if the energy, manpower, and parts in to the repair process are less than the margin on the item after repair. People have a very false sense of what green really is, largely due to missing the economies of scale of mass production. The manpower and thermodynamics of repair are highly unfavorable for individual products for such inexpensive items.

The word green is heavily misused by those with an incomplete understanding of physics and chemistry. The same goes for sorting recyclables in your home. If it takes you an hour of "hard work" each week, the air conditioning and food you consumed to do the work cost the environment more than the sorting benefits. A lot of the same challenges exist for the silly ARM computing clusters, where sure, the CPUs have a marginally higher performance per watt compared to a pair of Xeons running a few hundred virtualized server, but all of the ARM supporting glue logic, networking, memory, and storage ultimate take MORE electricity than the single headed system.

I wonder where iFixit will be in 20 or 30 years? or even 10? I can imagine one day where these SoC are one circuit board with no discreet components.

The day they can fit an 8" display into a SoC I'll be impressed!

If anything, that should improve repairability. Right now everything that's on the motherboard could (theoretically) go into a single SoC which would make it cheaper to replace than replacing the entire motherboard with many different components if one of them dies. I also imagine it would involve a lot more scanning of chips to see what's in them, rather than just pulling apart.

But it might get easier to repair things, especially as costs shrink, when there are less parts. Things like bonding the glass to the LCD sucks now, but as LCD's get cheaper to produce it might make replacing the whole thing a viable option again.

IFixit gets upset because this affects their business of selling parts and tools to people who want to fix their own devices. The harder it is to disassemble, the less likely people will buy product from iFixit. It's pretty simple to understand their motivation.

But seriously, other than a few people who like to do this for various reasons, no one wants to bother. If the screen breaks, and it's under warrantee, it gets taken back to the store, or sent back. If it's out of warrantee, it might just get replaced for a newer, better performing model. A good excuse to buy one.

As far as batteries go, good quality products have batteries that will last as long as the product is expected to be used, which is a good three years. My iphone and tablets, so far haven't had a problem with them, and my daughter's 3GS, several years ago had its battery replaced for free by Apple.

So I think this repairability index they make up, which is really very subjective on their part, is a lot of hogwash for most people. Just remember that if someone does buy a cheap phone or especially a tablet, that the screen, at retail, can easily cost more than half the price of that cheap device, which makes it not worth repairing.

Maybe they have everything fastened down because of the way people treat commodity gear?

Doesn't that sound a little convenient for the manufacturers? They use a sub quality component that fails in a year and they say "Too bad! Got to get a new device from us!"

I do not like the direction non repairable devices are going. It encourages waste, not just of precious materials but of money. Some day archeologists (or alien archeologists) will sort through our dumps to learn more about how we lived in the early 21st century and they find millions of small electronic devices and they will scratch their head and ask why we could not reuse or fix them.

A lot of it has to do with cost, and the rest has to do with size. With the unfortunate tendency of people to rush to the cheapest product, the manufacturers have to save money. So glue is a great way to do that. It's cheaper to use glue than to have bosses for screws, which then, more often than not, need to be assembled by hand. Glue needs to be as assembled that way too, but it takes less time and skill than using an electric screwdriver to drive those tiny screws.

And then there is weight and size. People are swayed by thickness and weight. The thinner it is, the less options there are for assembly. Same thing for weight. So everything is cleverly designed to fit tightly with lots of glue.

And glue is also a better protector of circuits, as it has some "give" when something gets banged around, or dropped. Screws are unyielding.

I was a designer, and manufacturer of electronics once upon a time, so I see this stuff in a different light.

It also has to be remembered that the cheaper the device is, especially if the performance is expected to run above that price level, is that manufacturers are running on very slim margins. Amazon, according to Bezos himself, makes no profit on the actual device, and maybe even takes a loss, hoping to make it up on sales they would t have otherwise gotten from people with other manufacturers devices. So there's little incentive for them to make something the more expensive way. After a year, if it breaks, throw it away and buy a better one. Waste, sure, but that's the way things are today where it's more expensive to repair a cheap device than to replace it.

I wonder where iFixit will be in 20 or 30 years? or even 10? I can imagine one day where these SoC are one circuit board with no discreet components.

The day they can fit an 8" display into a SoC I'll be impressed!

If anything, that should improve repairability. Right now everything that's on the motherboard could (theoretically) go into a single SoC which would make it cheaper to replace than replacing the entire motherboard with many different components if one of them dies. I also imagine it would involve a lot more scanning of chips to see what's in them, rather than just pulling apart.

But it might get easier to repair things, especially as costs shrink, when there are less parts. Things like bonding the glass to the LCD sucks now, but as LCD's get cheaper to produce it might make replacing the whole thing a viable option again.

I think he means that there will be a device where everything will be integrated to such an extent that there won't be individual parts to replace, just one big, solid, piece.

I just recently fixed my Kindle Keyboard broken display rather purchasing a new Kindle Paperwhite because the older Kindle Keyboard included free 3G web browsing while the Paperwhite doesn't. Of couse, if I were to purchase a new Kindle, it would be a WiFi model.

The only thing that really needs to be user replacable is the battery. Why is it that my Android phone has a easily replacable battery while the iPhone, iPad, and my Android tablet doesn't? If I am out and about during the day, I can easily go though 2-3 batteries because the biggest drain is having my phone screen active.

I like the idea of iFixIt and sustainability...not disposing an expensive gadget because damage, but in the end, that is the way devices like this will be, miniaturization has made handheld consumer electronics a sealed black box.

I think the green factor comes into play when you think of the amount of waste there is from electronic components when you're throwing away the whole thing, vs repairing just the bits and bobs that need replacement.

I saw an ad for a phone that looks like a grid where you plug in components that are easily replaced or upgraded, rather than replacing the whole phone. Phoneblock or something like that. Seems like a neat idea, if you're willing to be tied to that infrastructure.

(I don't get the photo with all the pencils in it. What does that demonstrate?)

They are plastic tools called spudgers, and they're being used to apply relatively even pressure to pry the battery loose. They demonstrate how tightly the battery is glued down. You'd usually only need one or two to evenly pry the battery out. (Disclosure, I'm not associated with ifixit but have used it a number of times.)

I think the green factor comes into play when you think of the amount of waste there is from electronic components when you're throwing away the whole thing, vs repairing just the bits and bobs that need replacement.

I saw an ad for a phone that looks like a grid where you plug in components that are easily replaced or upgraded, rather than replacing the whole phone. Phoneblock or something like that. Seems like a neat idea, if you're willing to be tied to that infrastructure.

(I don't get the photo with all the pencils in it. What does that demonstrate?)

I saw an ad for a phone that looks like a grid where you plug in components that are easily replaced or upgraded, rather than replacing the whole phone. Phoneblock or something like that. Seems like a neat idea, if you're willing to be tied to that infrastructure.

And willing to carry around a phone the size of a 1990s cell phone...

Sockets take space. Casings take space. Daughterboards take space. All of it takes space, and that space either comes at the expense of other things (battery), or more likely, by creating a huge case for it.

All the other design choices I'm fine with, I don't need to replace a motherboard or display, chances of them going bad are very slim. But why glue the battery down with so much adhesive? A year of heavy use and the battery has already lost a bit of capacity, after two it probably needs replaced.